Moments of Misery: Bed Bugs…?

Most of our posts on this blog will be happy recollections of some moments of our trip. But life on the road won’t always be fun. We feel like we’d like to share some of these moments of misery too. (OK, and vent a little about them too…)

Good night, don’t let the bed bugs bite! Normally you think this is just a cute little rhyme. It’s a lot less cute when, suddenly, the bed bugs do bite. During our first stay in Greece, we woke up in the morning with some unexplained bites on our arms and heads. We weren’t really sure what they were. It seemed possible that they were mosquito bites… but they seemed to be a little bit too grouped for that. We didn’t see any evidence of bed bugs, so we didn’t worry too much… yet. We slept a second night at the same location. Eric woke up with bites again, this time it looked like some bug had marched up his back and around his neck… though Della had none. We met another couple who talked about their experience with bed bugs and it had some similarities to what we were experiencing. Again, we found no evidence of actual bugs though.

We moved to our second place in Greece, feeling incredibly guilty if we were bringing bugs along with us. Though, we took many precautions to keep the place safe. Another night and Eric had a few more bites, though now they seemed random and Della still had none. Bed bugs or not?!? We just couldn’t be sure. All of our research said we had to actually see the bugs! We took our bags apart and scoured everything. Della found nothing, but Eric found 2 things that might have maybe been bugs? Too small to tell. At this point we had a decision to make, continue our plans to head to the Peloponnese, staying in more small towns, or head to Athens where we could find a laundromat and try to kill the maybe bugs once and for all. We used some info from this site and our new travel friends who talked about how they got rid of them. Oh… did I mention that this was happening on our 10 year anniversary???

We decided to head to Athens where we found a laundromat and promptly washed and/or dried every piece of clothing or bags we have. This included all of our packing cubes, our toiletry kits, our day bags, and even our large bags themselves, as well as our clothes of course. This was not super easy as we had to take everything apart and somehow figure out how to get the bags in small dryers.

Holding the dryer shut… because our bags kept pushing it open…

Laundromat

Everything came out of our bags… Can you believe we carry that much stuff around? Most of it is in the washer or dryer even!

A couple hours and almost 15 euro later we were done. We headed to our AirBnB feeling pretty confident that it would be just us for the night.

[…] already briefly visited Athens earlier in our trip when we needed to take care of some business. After we finished our tour of the Peloponnese, we wanted to make sure to get to Athens in plenty […]